POLITICAL FALLOUT SHOULD BE MINOR IN "PHONEY FRED"

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Posted Wednesday, September 12, 2007

By - John Boyanoski

Pundits believe the controversy over an anti-Fred Thompson site that has links to South Carolina won't last long.

Media outlets have been buzzing over a site that was shut down this week that denounced former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., as a "phony." The site was connected to Wesley Donehue, who has been on the payroll of the presidential campaign of former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Donehue is also a business associate with two of Romney's top South Carolina advisers.

However, while this may be the first major controversy of the 2008 campaign in South Carolina, it likely won't have a major bearing down the road.

"I think this will be relatively short-lived," said David Woodard, a Clemson University political science professor. "In this media-fragmented environment, things get out of hand more quickly than they did in the past."

Taft Matney, a Greenville-based Republican political consultant, said the story won't factor much into state politics either even though the controversy has been tied to Warren Tompkins, one of the state's pre-eminent political pundits.

"It's great fodder for talking heads today," Matney said. "But in the grand scheme of things, it's not much more than a story to break up the monotony of a presidential campaign season that still has another year to go."

Romney and his campaign leaders said they did not authorize the site and did not know anything about http://www.phoneyfred.com until they got calls from the media this week.

The site was hosted by a company in Utah and had links to Under the Power Lines, a political consulting site run Tompkins', a former executive director of the state Republican Party. He is one of the state's most recognized political leaders, and served as President Bush's Southeast regional director during the 2000 campaign.

Thompson's campaign fired back saying, "today's half-baked cover-up attempt by the Romney campaign does not even pass the laugh test."

Matney said (this) should be expected.

"There will be a lot of puffing from every campaign -- with candidates and their staffs denouncing the action -- but I'm sure that with another 14 months before all of the dust settles, there will be bigger 'scandals' than this," Matney said.

John Boyanoski can be reached at jboyanoski@scpols.com.

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